A Cataclysmic Dawn: Careful Moral Framing Is Crucial

Morality is a concept which has really come into the mainstream of games over the past few years in gaming — either by player agency or design. Many of these decisions are framed in binary: something is either good, or it’s bad, ignoring all long-term consequences or side effects that may occur.

By focusing purely on these binaries, within the perspective provided by the developer, players derive some meaning or outcome about their protagonists, but by looking at the broader context, a far more detailed, less morally binary outlook can be attained.

There are some spoilers in this article, so be forewarned — if you see a game you don’t want spoiled, don’t read

Games often provide players with the opportunity to make heavy, impactful decisions about their characters’ moral standings — which reflect either positively or negatively depending their context and framing.

inFamous was one of the series which most vehemently pushed a system of good vs. evil; but the games often failed to consider long-term consequences of Cole’s (pre-Second Son) actions. Especially in the second game, many of Cole’s actions are simply permutations of actions which predominantly serve his benefit rather than those which would genuinely benefit the populace of New Marais.

An example of this would be the attack on a militia base to save agent Kuo, one of your companions in the game. The bad karma option involves you ramming an explosive-laden truck into the facility to lessen the militia numbers, but hurting nearby civilians in the process, while the good option sees you freeing militia-captured police officers to fight with you in battle.

“He seems like a benevolent god.” “Why?” “His lightning is blue, you see.”

This good option means that you have the backing of previously captive police officers, who presumably have been kept in adverse conditions and thus are not in a state where they should really be fighting; this means they serve as a distraction — and an expendable one at that — for the superhuman Cole McGrath, who is only attacking the militia to further his own ends.

This also doesn’t guarantee the safety of civilians in the area: The militia are still firing guns and rockets with reckless abandon around the area, as well as wildly throwing grenades. In addition to this, you also have Cole firing off various lightning powers, including the debilitating Ionic Vortex, which tears through the environment with very little accuracy, sending debris and hazardous materials flying.

Other than the fact that you are not pointedly killing civilians, there’s very little to indicate that your actions are any morally justified in the good decision than in the bad. In fact, given that you are instigating combat out of the militia in a militia-controlled zone and putting both police and civilians in the firing line not only in the short-term but for days after, so that you can rescue a friend of yours, is almost unequivocally a morally reprehensible action with negative outcome.

In fact, even inFamous 2‘s good Karma ending, which sees Cole sacrificing his life and the lives of every other living Conduit to eradicate a plague is morally questionable. There is no clear way of identifying Conduits in the pre-Second Son era of inFamous games, which means Cole, by eradicating the conduits, may be massacring a sizeable chunk of humanity to save a niche crowd.

While the ratio in the games tend to indicate that Conduits are few and far between, an assessment of three cities whose Conduits are never fully found cannot serve to be a holistic representation of the entire inFamous universe’s Conduit population. As it turns out, Cole doesn’t destroy the Conduit gene (or Second Son couldn’t have happened) and the plague is cleansed, so everything turns out far better than it could have; but to say this decision was morally justified, when he could have potentially destroyed a huge part of the population, is absolutely false.

And so we got this guy. Thanks Cole.

However, these decisions are never presented in this light. In the Hero playthrough, Cole is recognised as a hero for his actions, and he is heralded as a paragon — something we, as the consumers of this media, buy into due to how it’s framed to position Cole as a clear hero, despite his rashness and selfishness.

This is something that’s sometimes applied in games which don’t have branching storylines — games such as Double Fine’s point-and-click adventure, Broken Age.

Act 2 of Broken Age through Vella’s eyes places you in the badly-damaged ship which you took down in the first act, which has been built to harvest young women for the improvement of the genetics of the Thrush — a eugenics-ridden isolationist race who exist past the Plague Dam.

When you arrive at Loruna, the home of the Thrush, Vella creates a bomb out of a radioactive reactor core, and a couple of miscellaneous items on the ship, which you subsequently drop out of the ship to stop the Thrush from following you as you escape the city.

Quite literally, Vella nukes her enemies and no one ever questions it; she detonates a nuclear device in a massive city, which could contains hundreds upon thousands of innocent civilians, because she wants to destroy the mogs (other ships) to create an opening for her ship to escape. Thankfully, the post-game exposition shows that the detonation did not destroy Loruna or kill countless civilians — that ending would probably be a bit dark for what Double Fine were creating.

“Oh no! I may have just killed millions of people.”

Very few games deal with moral greyness directly — Fallout has, on a couple of occasions, such as in Tenpenny Tower, where working towards an equitable living space for ghouls amongst the Wasteland’s elite in the tower will result in the ghouls murdering them.

However, it has also brushed off other horrifying examples, such as emotionally manipulating children into opening up a path to Vault 87 from Little Lamplight for the protagonist’s personal objectives, which could compromise the children’s safety to hostile super mutants, who are known for eating and dismembering humans. These two separate examples both occur during Fallout 3, although the former is framed to make sure the player is aware of their actions, while the latter is framed as necessary.

The Witcher also has a history of dealing with moral greyness, whether this be helping a sorceress while unwittingly playing accomplice to attempted regicide or healing a gravely wounded peasant with a Witcher potion, only to find that this irreparably damages her mind. In fact, The Witcher series, specifically The Witcher 3, makes sure that the player, and as a result Geralt, almost always questions their decisions, which more often than not lead to innocent death in some form or other.

Because decisions are consistently built up as morally questionable, this leads to more engaged players — instead of automatically hitting L2 for Paragon and R2 for Renegade, or the obvious choice, players question what they have learnt about the world they exist in, and make weighty decisions which reflect either their implicit personal experiences or those of the character they are role-playing as. In CD Projekt RED’s case, this led to a game filled with poignant, affective decisions, which shaped the world in ways players sometimes couldn’t predict.

Sometimes your decisions aren’t so morally grey as much as “Oops, I just burnt down a village”.

That’s not to say all games need to delve in to moral greyness — Broken Age would not have been a better game for any force-fed self-reflection, which would have detracted from its light-hearted atmosphere and charming aesthetic; inFamous 2 may have benefited from moral greyness, but would have suffered from a lack of focus in a game which was otherwise focused on absolutes; and Fallout 3‘s choice to spare players an arc in which Little Lamplight fell under threat from Vault 87’s mutants was probably best for the flow of the story, which advances swiftly past Vault 87 into the Enclave, while its choice to show the ghouls’ actions showcased the brutality of post-apocalyptia.

This is about the framing of these events — the fact that it was okay for Vella to drop a nuke because it was covered in ice-cream — and how this contributed both to the atmosphere and continuity of these games. Framing was crucial in ensuring these events kept the tone of the rest of their respective games, and framing was crucial in ensuring that somehow, all these incidents still had a huge impact on the games in which they were contained.

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